iPhoto ’09 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide

Chapter 6. Editing Photos

If you’re anything like me, not all your photos come out perfect. In fact, lots of them are probably pretty bad, and those you can delete after import. No harm, no foul, and you didn’t pay for developing.

Nondestructive Editing

In the first few versions of iPhoto, the program saved each change as you made it, which was a bad idea because the lossy JPEG compression that was applied each time could degrade the image quality. In iPhoto 5, Apple reduced the number of times an edited photo would be recompressed by writing all changes out at once when you clicked Done or moved to another photo.

In iPhoto ’08, Apple switched again, this time to the nondestructive editing approach used by Aperture, iPhoto’s high-end sibling. Since ...